Open Thread - 09-18-26 - I Took a Walk
Folks, do you ever get tired of the political bullshit to the point that you just want to walk away from it all?
Yeah, me too.
Have you ever asked yourself why you haven't walked away from it all already?
Yeah, me too.
But yet, here we are. Still pointing out the bullshit as we see it.
Why is that? Why do we do it?
I certainly can't speak for anyone else, but I can speak for myself.
I do it because I'm old enough to remember how this country used to be. It's never been perfect, that's for sure, but as I remember it, my life was much more structured, rational, and dare I say sane, for most of my days gone by, anyway. That is, things seemed better up until the pivotal passage of the Patriot Act in October, 2001. To me, this is the mark in the timeline when this country fast-tracked the loss of its collective mind and We the People had many of our rights stolen, yet to be returned.
The slow decay of the nation's essence and vitality continued through Iraq and Afghanistan, through the 2008 financial crisis, through the quickening grind of national debt and a ramping up of inflation, until 2020, when everything changed and the nation became a bizarre shell of its former self.
And here we are, 2026, with the world obviously running out of resources, running out of economic stability, running out of sanity, and running out of time. We're teetering on the edge of multiple crises, any one of which could bring down the whole corrupt enchilada, and We the People have been so artificially divided that we hardly even interact with one another in the real world, much less the online world, that has been even more subdivided. To our collective detriment.
It's a wonder that the species has gotten this far.
I do it because I'm old enough to remember a better time, a better ethos, a better place to live. And I feel I should call out the bullshit as I see it, for anyone that may want to hear it, and especially for those that may not want to hear it.
So they may know, that it could be better, again.
I Took a Walk by Shawn Phillips (1972)
4:49
Comments
Good morning Free Rangers...
I'm proud to stand and call out the bullshit with you, my friends.
Envious of populations living within progressive societies
We have been witness to a general decline in the quality of life
since the 70's from my experience. Certain boosts like 911 (planned),
patriot act (pre-arranged) and general endless wars of choice have hastened
the cliff falling experience. Perhaps one needs to be of a certain vintage to
recognize the negative changes? Having a particular mindset and spiritual
orientation is key to understanding.
Thanks for the OT.
Zionism is a social disease
The younger generations...
that have no recollection of what this country was like as we experienced it need to hear our testimonies. They have no idea of the world we knew except for what the propaganda driven media tells them.
What the younger generations have been taught by the divide and conquer mouthpieces is everything is the boomer's fault. How many times have you seen "OK boomer" in threads around the net? That's bullshit.
Speak your truth, brother.
Well said, friend.
When I see the state of the world as a result of what the US has been doing, and will continue to do- I honestly don't know whether to cry to keep from laughing, or laugh to keep from crying...
Sooner or later, the world will band together to stop it; and We The People will most certainly suffer as a result.
We've collectively passed the point at which we were once allowed to vote for the politicians we thought would help us the most, and have sailed blithely on to where we are now, which is to vote for the politicians we naively think will hurt us the least.
This is by design. It is a bad design.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
I think of that a lot myself...
There's no doubt Hitler was an evil son of a bitch and deserved what he got in the end. But there were plenty of innocent German volken that paid the price when the allies overran Germany at the end of WWII. It didn't matter if they sympathized with the Nazis or not, if they were German they were guilty. And they suffered.
Also think of the Japanese Americans that were placed in concentration camps here in the US, solely because they were of Japanese heritage.
Think of the innocents in Georgia when Sherman scorched the earth.
Over and over, down through history, the innocent pay the price for the evil.
I think of that a lot when it comes time for the US to pay the piper his due.
I've rethought the voting thing the last few years, does it really matter?
And I agree, it is all by design.
Speak your truth, brother.
The town I grew up in
was 8 miles south of the Mason-Dixon line, out at its extreme west end next to the Injun Country. The neighborhood was used by Sherman's happy band as a place to practice and perfect their scorched-earth skills: there were Sherman's neckties around large trees all over the place, near the old railroad right-of way that once headed south. And pretty much everything in town was burned, with only a few exceptions.
They did such a dandy job of their destruction that my home town didn't actually get electricity until after WWII.
In that part of the South, there were no plantations to despoil, no cotton fields to salt, no slave-holders to rape and kill, no manufacturing to disrupt. No, just folks trying to eke out their meager livings in the hill country, raising food to survive. Didn't matter: the troops were "just following orders" to destroy everything, and boy didn't they just.
The next time US troops are used on US citizens, I expect no less. We'll be treated like the aboriginal peoples (Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly) at Sand Creek in 1864, and the soldiers won't think twice about it, just as back then. Or the black residents of Tulsa in 1921. Or the residents of the wrong block in Philadelphia in 1985. The list is long, and chilling.
We The People provide what our glorious, testosterone-soaked warfighters would call a "target-rich environment". I hope to die in my sleep before this comes to pass.
The people who reinvented this XTC video have done a pretty good job of getting to the meat of the propaganda sandwich, in parody form...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Thank you...
for the expansion of my thoughts. You expressed and delineated it well and right on point.
With the recent effort to combine our military with extraneous forces, it may not be US troops that could potentially be used on US citizens in the future.
I went to youtube and watched the XTC video, good stuff, and potent.
Speak your truth, brother.
Good morning...
...Been getting out early and getting chores done before it gets so hot.
I see our nation's decline as starting just before my birth with the creation of the CIA, our mafia branch of gov't. Since then they assassinated JFK, MLK, RFK, Malcom X and set up Nixon for impeachment. It is my belief they were behind 911 to start our war of terror abroad and at home. Not to mention the Plandemic.
Anyone who might challenge them is eliminated, or silenced (think Julian). As Neil Oliver recently said, I too feel like I'm a card carrying conspiracy theorist.
The thing I most appreciate about the C99 site is the freedom to express these ideas. Many thanks!
Have a great Friday and thanks for the OT!
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Your timeline...
matches mine:
But to me the the hyper craziness we're witnessing today began in 2001 with 9-11 and the subsequent Patriot Act and has amplified into the super duper hyper craziness we're living through right now.
It's so bad now, what the hell do we have to look forward to in the future?
That's been the goal since the inception.
Speak your truth, brother.
Why are we on the hook for the evils 'in our name'
.
by the PTB? Ain't nothing we've done AFAIK.
Except maybe voting in a sham system.
Zionism is a social disease
I don't know, man...
except it's part and parcel to the propagandist's handbook. Lump a group together and dehumanize them all as nothing but animals.
That's a dark component of human nature.
Speak your truth, brother.
Perhaps a bit of jazz is in order
Zionism is a social disease
Brubeck is so smooth...
I always feel like I should "Take Five" when I hear him.
Good morning, Cap'n, excellent piece of music, anytime
of day. Thanks.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Here's the segment from Sabrina Salvati's show
that I mentioned previously
Rock and roll high school!
"Progress is not possible without deviation" -- Frank Zappa
The tentacles run deep...
but the tide is turning. People are waking up to the scam and putting their money where their mouth is by boycotting the scammers.
The harder they try to stem the tide, the deeper the water gets.
Screw em, Cass.
Speak your truth, brother.
I too
think it started with the creation of the OSS, the precursor of the CIA.
It was they who instigated Operation Paperclip, OP Mockingbird, Gladio, and a host of others to capture our government through hook or crook.
"Ike" warned us all.
JFK showed us the way.
Once the "Fairness Doctrine" was disposed of, it was clear sailing for mass indoctrination.
I engage my kids and grandkids about how this country used to be all the time. Usually to their wide-eyed disbelief.
I never fail to refer to the Evening News as regime propaganda.
I hope it sticks.
Thanks for the OT and the tunes. Really miss Marvin.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
I can't imagine...
being born after 2001, or whatever date you want to pick, and thinking this bullshit is how the world is supposed to work. That's why it's so important that we oldtimers speak up while we still can, because the history we lived through and remember is being rewritten at a frightening pace.
Speak your truth, brother.
Talking a walk
...along the banks of a pond... I have often thought of the metaphor of throwing a pebble in the pond, to justify writing or making comments online. You never know what the impact might be. It might amount to nothing or...?
I was somewhat surprised then, but after all it is an obvious metaphor, when I saw that the South Korean dissident poet Kim Nam-ju, a political prisoner for ten years, had written a poem called One Pebble. It is related to the Firefly metaphor in another poem he wrote. He talks of a friend with him as they each throw one pebble in the pond. Is this an imaginary friend? Or does the metaphor apply to all who express their resistance however temporal or apparently ineffective?
I didn't post the poem because it seemed too dark. I'm guessing he was in prison when he wrote it. Don't want to depress or discourage anyone. But I definitely draw strength from the One Pebble metaphor, and the power of the art of expression, song, music, poetry, visual arts, literature, etc. I'm willing to grant almost any political or historical expression value even if only to reflect the author's perception or state of mind. Naturally, I value the views expressed here considerably more. There is a lot less noise and distraction and more substance. Who knows what benefit to hear the perspective or experience of another well expressed.
Thanks for the open thread, JtC. Glad to hear the positive news from the home front.
己所不欲，勿施于人。
I read the poem...
and find it a beautiful and apt metaphor to this piece, despite the last two lines, I wish I had thought of it. It gets to the crux of my intentions, you may never know where or who the ripple may intersect with.
I think it's the latter.
Thank you for this excellent comment, well expressed. And thank you for the well wishes.
Speak your truth, brother.
I am lifting this paragraph
from a commenter named Caliman at Moon of Alabama:
"The two party system (even more than other modern so-called representative democracies) is tailor made to enable oligarchic governance by the monied elite. As our great founding fathers said, the people who own the place should govern it … and so it has been since."
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Great quote...
and one of the fatal flaws in the system.
Do we even need two parties? Can't we just have candidates run for office without being a part of the corrupt two party system?
Speak your truth, sister.
And the result?
As the saying goes, voting is the adult version of writing a letter to Santa Claus.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I thought that saying...
...was about praying.
Well,
come se come sa
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
Good morning Johnny, very late to the show here. The Feebs
were invented out of thin air, not authorized by the Constitution or Congress, to be some sort of federal/national cops. They weere pretty much scofflaws since day one, at least as to people's rights, and fabricated or falsified or severely exaggerated mountains of evidence. Then came the CIA and then a slew of assassinations. Clinton deregulated a lot of things that shouldn't have been deregulated and shrub gave us the Unconstitutional Patriot Act.
So that's the recognizeable milestones, but looking back on everything, it it has been downhill since the fifties, but maybe didn't notice until the seventies. The qualify of life was maybe a bit better in the sixties, maybe not, but who can say, we all grew up in microcosms. But, though I didn't really fully see it at the time, the fifties, especially mainstream, was an era where there seemed to be hope for the future as a baseline, kind of a rose colored glasses type of thing. By the sixties that was downgraded to a struggle to try to bring about a better future, with glimpses of hope that we might be winning every now and then. By the seventies we were looking for a miracle.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Ah...
an excellent compendium of the truth as you see it, mi hermano, and is agreed upon by the author of this piece.
There have been Constitutional outlaws all the way back to the Founding Fathers, and although it's not perfect it's the best document of governance that mankind has offered so far, IMHO.
The problem is, it's being reinterpreted by lessor men of stature, small men, as I see it. And we're losing our country because of it.
Speak your truth, brother.
My favorite Cockburn
tune, WRT the current state of affairs...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
I frequently speak of the bicameral brain.
Hoping we can come to collective terms with that.
It's the only way out of the terminal echo chamber.
Mayhaps...
a way to remotely disconnect the left brain from the right has been discovered. Much like our two party system of mis-governance and the bicameral cults that it has conceived. That would make the echo chambers permanently compartmentalized, and would explain a lot of the inside out and upside down facets of this wrong-headed world.
Speak your truth, sister.
Disconnecting the right and left brains used to be routine,
especially for rebels, visionaries and radical non-conformists. It was called a lobotomy. ...I'm with you in Rockland ...
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Lobotomized patients led us
...to the study of the roots of consciousness.
And that led to the study of collective consciousness in living species.
And that explains why Homo sapiens is not a sentient species.
There's no political solution
subjugate the meek and prosecute the strong
Zionism is a social disease
A reflection upon an Alastair Crooke interview
A reflection upon an Alastair Crooke interview
At the end, Crooke summarizes: it's a reset for the Middle East as it was before the American intervention. My response: to be sure, certain things will be reset. The relationship between the various groups of the Arabian peninsula, those who can survive next summer there, will be reset. But there were intervening groups that will not be coming back:
1) the French and the British. Remember, in the early 1920s they carved up the Fertile Crescent from what used to be the domain of:
2) the Ottomans. To be sure, there is still Turkiye. But Turkiye is not the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans are also not coming back.
Here one recalls another complicating factor, that the Ottoman forces, such as they were, were often forces fighting for their own power independently of any will which the Sultan, whomever he was, might pose on them. The Janissaries, for instance. Or Mehmed Ali, who had a kingdom-within-a-kingdom of his own in Egypt and who was called upon in an attempt to snuff out the Greek Revolution of the 1820s. Those things are not coming back either.
So I'm expecting something different.
"Progress is not possible without deviation" -- Frank Zappa
The Ottomans were doomed long before they were
partitioned. Really nowhere to go, no colonies to exploit and only a tenuous grib on the Arabian Peninsula
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Every time I try to get out, I get pulled back in.
Considering what I understand to be our respective age-gap, it's telling how your reckoning here echoes mine nearly note-for-note (save that I'd place the Rubicon at Bush coup'ing his way into the White House to begin with).
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
The profound disconnect began with the Crusades.
From there, it rebirthed again and again. This is a mutating issue in Western civilizations and parasite nations, only.
The truth...
knows no age-gap, as far as I'm concerned.
Speak your truth, brother.
Oh! Oh! I just realized that this is the perfect time....
...to drop the most important truth-telling I have come upon in recent years.
But I am so tired of dropping important things in empty rooms.
Empty rooms?
come on, drop it P, you've got me intrigued now.
You're right. And you are the only one who really matters here.
Please take this in slowly. I think it is a completely accidental spill. It contains many far-reaching implications in many immediate hotspots. I'm not offering any commentary. Just be mindful that more than 90 percent of the interviews that appear on c99 are military-rooted
Thanks for
kicking that in! There are a number of us who really do value what we find and share here, from and for all who are willing to do the sharing.
And, speaking strictly for myself: I quite like this room, and ‘taint nohow empty…
I’ll steal (and utterly misrepresent) a slogan from JtC and say “Say your truth, dawg!” (;-)
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
I already gave at the office.
This is something extra, pal.
I dunno
but I think that peoples bullshit meters are kicking in. The slogan of capitalism being the greatest system (with deliberate confusion with democracy) is apparent that it only works for the 1%. The corruption of both parties is pretty complete. Give tax breaks to corps. and the 1% and they'll kick back some of those tax break dollars to the pols. Insider trading? Of course! Treat the military like employees? Sure! Send em' out to do the 1%'s dirty work.
Nothing is transparent and nobody thinks our government has it's citizens needs at it's core. Aside from the tax breaks, how much is spent on the endless negative advertising political campaigns? People are seeing their guy isn't that much better than the other guy. Crappy, dodgy non profits that don't do much except pay exorbitant salaries without much benefit to it's core purpose.
Meanwhile. you look in the mirror and wonder why we subsidize Israel, when their citizens have national health care?
Yup...
yup and yup.
We are tax donkeys, only there to give the system our compliance. Hell, they don't even need us for that since they can print money to infinity. Until the system breaks and the tax donkeys have to bail the crooks out, once again.
The corrupt system is about to break, big time, but they have a brand new corrupt system waiting in the wings to spring on us when the time is right.
The whole thing is a facade, smoke and mirrors, a casino set up for the monied class.
But, you're right, peoples bullshit meters are kicking in, and that scares them.
Speak your truth, brother.